The Paris Wife III

[thisnewday]

One of the things that strikes me in reading the various accounts, whether fictional or factual, of these bohemian lives and exotic times, is that the core experiences of life, the challenges we face, the solutions we try, and the results we arrive at, are almost universally the same despite the lesser distinctions we sometimes try to draw around our basic humanity...

LPK
LiveJournal
2.26.2011 (b)

Comments

[amandagayle.livejournal.com]

I've had to read this several times, and every time I read it, I understand it differently, or not at all, or earth-shakingly so. I don't know.

[olbuksings.livejournal.com]

You know, now that I'm re-reading it, I'm having the same problem. Sometimes when I write something I truly feel that I'm channeling something from outside my own plane of existance. In this case, I may have been channeling my inner illiterate.

The upside of this is that, because we're no longer writing things in stone, no one several millenia in the future will drive themselves nuts trying to decipher this. Because, really, who wants to be the subject of some boring stranger's doctoral dissertation?

[olbuksings.livejournal.com]

OK, I apologize for being flippant and I really can't leave it at that. But maybe I really was having trouble expressing a relatively simple thing. I think that one of the "lesser distinctions," one of the distractions from our basic humanity, maybe, is that of social class.

It's a really pervasive theme in Fitzgerald's and Hemingway's writings and, from what I've read, in their personal lives as well. It's one of the things that set their lives apart from the masses whether in Oak Park or Key West or Paris. And Hemingway, for all his pretensions of disdain for the rich and powerful, was worse in my view than Fitzgerald who was at least forthright in his envy.

But here's the thing that finally sunk in after reading McLain's first person narrative, her channeling of Hadley Richardson in The Paris Wife: that these romantic rebels, as I guess I'd always seen them, were well and truly f*cked up. And they not only effed up their own lives but everyone else's around them.

Even as I write this, I'm amazed at how little I understood about the volumes of stuff that I'd read. I mean, it was a constant theme in Fitzgerald's novels and, if I had my books close by, I could probably pull out dozens of quotes to that effect. Short of that, how about a book title that pretty much sums it up, The Beautiful and the Damned?

The thing is, once you comprehend the superficiality of all the glitz and glitter, which Fitzgerald wrote his best novel, The Great Gatsby, to help us see through, it's all so sordid and common. In the end, it's just like the horrific mess that the rest of us, from the top of the social ladder to the bottom, have at times made of our own lives.

And all these years I still didn't get it. What a dope. But then I live in a society that tried to impeach a president for having oval sex in the oral office. Or something like that. We're shocked and dismayed and outraged when someone pulls down the curtain that we've insisted must conceal the wizard.

Which makes me suspect that our anger is not really at what's gone on behind the curtain. What we're really angry at is the revelation of our own complicity in its concealment and the skewed reality it's allowed us to construct about our own lives and those of our public figures.

Anyway, Ms. McLain finally pulled down the curtain for me and I'm still pissed off at her because of it. How dare she, a housewife from Cleveland? Then again, you know where I live and were wise enough to brush the dust from your sandals on your way out of town...